The Unfinished Mind
Something has gone wrong with the way we think. Not our intelligence, that is not the problem. Our permeability. Our capacity to genuinely receive new evidence, to sit with uncertainty, to be actually changed by what is real rather than simply confirming what we already believe.Look around. We are living in a moment of profound collective closure. Conversations that once required courage now require armour.
Certainty has become identity. Changing your mind has become capitulation. And somewhere in the noise of outrage and algorithm, the rarer, more difficult practice, of remaining genuinely open, has been quietly abandoned as a weakness we can no longer afford.It is not a weakness. It is the only way through.The world we have built rewards certainty and punishes revision. It moves too fast for genuine reflection, optimises too hard for efficiency, and has quietly installed the performance of knowing as a substitute for the more difficult work of actually understanding. This is not a conspiracy.
It is not even intentional. It is simply what happens when the systems we live inside -educational, economic, digital- are designed for output rather than encounter, for confirmation rather than genuine inquiry.The Unfinished Mind is a rigorous, deeply personal, and urgently necessary argument for the recovery of what the author calls creative permeability- the capacity to remain genuinely open. Not agreeable. Not without conviction. Open: structured enough to have something to bring to an encounter, permeable enough to be genuinely changed by it.Drawing on neuroscience, art therapy, cognitive psychology, and a life lived between two irreconcilable cultures- Australian and Iranian- interdisciplinary artist and art therapist Arzu Meily traces how the closing of the human mind begins in childhood, accelerates through institutional education, and reaches its most visible expression in a world where political discourse has become performance, disagreement has become threat, and the capacity to hold complexity has become genuinely rare.
She examines the imagination debt, the identity trap, the body's suppressed intelligence, the specific cognitive gifts of the neurodiverse mind, and what grief, creative blocks, and the art of genuine noticing have to teach us about staying alive to our own experience.This book is for the person who is exhausted by certainty, their own and everyone else's. For anyone who senses that what the world needs is not louder arguments but a different quality of mind. For the professional who is competent and quietly hollowed. For anyone who stopped making things and still isn't sure why. For anyone who has been told, in one way or another, that the most alive parts of themselves were not the point.They were always the point.